The winner of the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham awards, and the author of the Victorian Gothic ghost tale The Woman in Black (the basis for the film of the same name, starring Daniel Radcliffe, as well as the long-running West End drama), Susan Hill turned to crime fiction in 2004 with her Simon Serrailler series. In this fifth outing, following The Vows of Silence, Serrailler is called back to Lafferton from his Scottish island sabbatical after two prostitutes are found strangled. By the time he arrives, a third is also murdered. But the spree takes an even more alarming turn when the wife of the new dean at the cathedral goes missing, followed by another young married woman on her way to work.

"Not all great novelists can write crime fiction, but when one like Susan Hill does it, the result is stunning."óRuth Rendell